Zoom Zoom Zoom

Make my heart go

Boom Boom 

My supernova girl

–Protozoa and the Microbes

 

Damn. You know that guy died a few years back? Yeah.

 

Come on Eobard, win it for him! Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. Make Black’s heart go boom boom. Make him your supernova girl.

 

ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM

 

We’re talking a huge upset here if Zoom doesn’t win. We’re talkin Gaara vs Toph. We’re talking Yang vs Tifa.

 

Even Rewind Rumble thinks Zoom wins and these guys love Dragon Ball more than life itself.

 

Okay. Take the Flash. And now add even more magic speed force powers. That’s Reverse Flash.

 

Did you not see the episode where Wally killed Sonic backed by all of his fanfiction wank and all Ben’s childhood love? Even the people backing Goku Black in this fight aren’t backing vanilla Black or Rose-mode Black. No one on God’s green Earth thinks they stand a chance. They’re putting their chips on Black merging with himself and then the universe, which is already stretching that “no outside help” rule. They’re putting their chips on Black transforming into arguably the strongest villain in the entire Dragon Ball franchise.

 

And you know what?

 

It’s not enough.

 

Imagine a guy that can go back in time as easy as walking down the street. That’s who Black is fighting.

 

“But Otto,” you say, “Goku Black’s time ring would prevent Black from being Terminated from reality. He’s not going to fade away in a puff of retcon logic. All Reverse Flash would do is create an alternate timeline. He’ll have to go back to the future and fight Black there.”

 

In DC, one of three things happens when someone goes back in time depending on who’s writing the story:

 

• 1. Fate conspires to stop you. Remember that time Booster Gold tried to save Batgirl from Joker and no matter how many times he tried he inexplicably failed? That’s an old rule in DC. I think the earliest example might be an old Superboy story (The Impossible Mission, Superboy 85) where he goes back in time to save Lincoln but can’t because Lex shows up with his own time machine to stop him. Lex didn’t mean to stop him (he actually liked Lincoln–old school Lex had a soft spot for great men like Lincoln and Einstein. I highly recommend reading Superman 416 for more on old school Lex’s character) he just tracked him through the time barrier to mess with him and didn’t pay attention to when or where he was. From this adventure, Superboy concluded that time couldn’t be changed. Fate would just Rube Goldberg things into stopping him. Later jaunts through the time barrier would appear to confirm his theory. For instance, when he went back to the age of Krypton in Superman 141, he found that he couldn’t save Krypton because the red sun took away his powers.

 

• 2. You create an alternate timeline. I think the earliest example of this comes from Superman 146 (not long after Superman failed to save Krypton). His mermaid girlfriend Lori Lemaris asks Superman to try going back in time and saving Atlantis. Superman says he’s tried changing the past, it’s never worked, but who is going to say no to a mermaid GF? Hell, I’d clean out an entire fortress full of gangsters, Eskimos, and skeletons for a mermaid GF. So Superman tries anyway, and much to his surprise, it works. He saves Atlantis. He’s so happy that he starts changing other events. He saves Lincoln (works this time!), Nathan Hale, random Christians from being devoured by lions in a Roman colosseum, saves Custer and his men from being massacred at Little Big Horn, and even saves Krypton by creating a bunch of star ships and tossing them at the planet so he doesn’t have to get close to the red sun. The Kryptonians pilot the ships away from their exploding planet and all is well–but wait! Superman returns to the present and finds history hasn’t changed! How can this be? He dips back into the timestream and finds another time barrier–a parallel reality–and enters it, finding that this is the world he changed. See? Hypertime is so old it’s even older than Hypertime! That’s just how Hypertime works. Later on, the Superman of Earth 154 (Bob Haney’s Saga of the Super-Sons) would create a temporary, collapsing timeline in order to test Superman II and Batman II. How very Donnie Darko! The latest example of this rule is probably that awful arc where the Teen Titans kick out Jon Kent because Tim Drake from the future goes back in time to kill Jon because in the future he gets upset at Damian’s death and explodes destroying the planet and it was pretty awful, but the takeaway here is that time travel can make forks in Hypertime.

 

• 3. “Flashes are red, speed powers are fine, but Barry’s gonna screw the timeline.” You ruin everything. See Flashpoint. After Superman stopped breaking through the time barrier post-Crisis, Flash picked up the schtick, but writers decided to limit his time travel shenanigans through a simple rule–if you use the speed force to change things in the past, bad stuff happens. Don’t do it. Barry saving his mom resulted in a dystopian present where Cyborg was the greatest hero on Earth (shudder). It was later retconned into being a multiverse wide catastrophe in Infinite Frontier.

 

What makes Eobard so dangerous as a supervillain is that he can ignore all of the above. He can make timelines follow his rules.

 

This isn’t like, a headcanon thing. When he tells Barry that he used to enjoy watching his parents grow old together but oops, Me Barry, Me, Barry tells him that’s impossible. Time can’t be changed. He’s tried. But Eobard tells him “Lol. Lmao. I got the reverse speed force and its cooler than the regular speed force so I can!” That’s when Barry realizes his mom didn’t die a natural death.

 

Eobard can use the reverse speed force to fore Terminator rules on the given timeline.

 

So no. Dragon Ball time rules will not save Goku Black.

 

Now imagine that you can be an acausal time monster. Imagine that you’re a bad guy called Paradox, and you not only create time paradoxes, you’re empowered by them. You’re so free from being terminated that you go back in time and kill yourself just for the power boost.

 

Reverse Flash can still retcon you into nonexistence just by touching you. He doesn’t even need his special lightning rod which harnesses the power of the speed force, because that’s something he also has.

 

Let me reiterate–he made a guy named Paradox, powered by paradoxes, obey the grandfather paradox and vanish.

 

The time ring isn’t going to stop that. Reverse Flash is going to make Goku Black like a fair Maricopa election. He won’t exist.

 

And oh yeah, he’s got several more powers stacked atop ME BARRY ME.

 

Hypnosis, psychic blasts, energy absorption, molecular disruption, and there are pages where Barry says he’s faster than Wally and you know Death Battle is going to use them for all their worth.

 

That is the Reverse Flash.

 

That is who is going to win. And if he doesn’t, they’re holding Swan’s family hostage.

 

Swan, give us a sign, man! Blink three times when you say Goku on the podcast if they have a gun trained on you!

 

Ways Eobard Can Win

 

Disassemble Zamasu at the molecular level.

 

Age Goku to dust.

 

Throw him into the speed force.

 

Throw him into the reverse speed force.

 

Throw him into Hypertime.

 

Throw him into the speed force, the reverse speed force, and Hypertime all at the same time.

 

Possess Zamasu and/or Goku.

 

Hit him with his lightning rod, which will remove any acausal protection. If the rod breaks, he can just go back in time and try again until it works.

 

Hit him with mental energy (yes really).

 

Use his hypnotic voice to force him into subconsciously holding back (these are still real powers he has. I’m making none of these up).

 

Create a multiverse level prison for Goku Black and put him in it. He did this to Paradox.

 

Bypass the causal protection granted by the time ring to prevent Goku Black from ever being created. Yes, this is a separate power from the lightning rod.

 

Turn Goku Black into a statue by absorbing his speed and doing to him what Wally did to Inertia.

 

Crash the universe with no survivors because one time Wally and Barry made the multiverse shake by racing, and you know how powerful shaking is to Death Battle. If Goku Black gets to be 3-4 digits worth of universes off shaking, it’s only fair Eobard gets the same consideration.

 

Ways Zamasu Can Win

 

Uh, none.

 

When Johns brought Eobard back in Doomsday Clock after Flashpoint Batman killed him, his surviving that and all previous deaths was explained by him being a living temporal paradox. He experiences all his deaths simultaneously while in the timestream.

 

This isn’t like Hulk’s regeneration, which Death Battle glossed over by saying it took too long to matter. Eobard dies, he experiences it simultaneously with all his other deaths, and a version of him in the timestream knows where and when the guy that killed him is.

 

You can’t be counted out of a fight when you can time travel to before you died.

 

The only way Barry was able to get rid of Eobard for was by using the speed force to “ground” him in a variation of the move Eobard did to Paradox. This retconned all of Eobard’s retcons, because the speed force is magic, and left him as a tour guide of the Flash Museum without any memory of having ever been the Reverse Flash–though lets face it, it’s only a matter of time before a writer (cough Johns cough) has him suddenly remember everything and become Reverse Flash again.

 

Zamasu has no way of grounding Eobard. He has no way of figuring out that’s what he needs to do and then figuring out how to do it. Maybe he has the resources to pull it off in his merged state. But that’s a stretch and half. When he goes wallpaper mode, he goes crazy. His vocabulary becomes AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The God of his multiverse can appears before him and he still laughs. He laughs until he’s being deleted from reality along with the universe he infected. Zamasu, fresh out of ascended godhood, is going to have to figure out how the reverse speed force works and how to use his cosmic powers to block Eobard from it before the picosecond speedster runs his universe into the ground.

 

In a race to find out how to kill the other, I’m betting on the speedster.